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Tax Analysts Blog

​In case you missed it, the border-adjustable tax officially got the boot. Don’t feel bad if you were among those intrigued by the House GOP blueprint for tax reform. The proposal enjoyed a good run, and served as a useful tutorial on foreign currency adjustments.

After failing spectacularly on healthcare reform, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will now turn their attention to taxes. President Trump is stumping for a tax cut as the signature achievement of his first term. But forces inside the White House have a different idea in mind. Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is reportedly pushing for a 44 percent top tax rate on incomes over $5 million.

Will tax reform necessarily contribute to economic growth? It’s tempting to answer with a resounding yes, but the better response is more cautious. The outcome depends on the details, suggesting that stakeholders would do well to manage their expectations.

The typical U.S. citizen is rightfully concerned about how much tax they pay, but their interest in the details of the tax code extends only so far. Broach the intricacies of transfer pricing and most people’s eyes immediately glaze over. This presents a challenge to proponents of tax reform legislation.

​Steve Bannon wants to soak the rich – or at least leave them a little bit damp. According to Axios, Bannon wants to use tax hikes on the rich to pay for tax cuts for the middle and working class. Apparently, President Trump’s chief political strategist believes such a move would be a “potent populist idea.”

French President Emmanuel Macron has radically reshaped the politics of his country in many ways. He crushed the Socialist Party candidate in the first round of the presidential elections, going on to easily defeat the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the second round. And his new party secured an outright majority in Parliament, relegating the Socialists to a small minority, while the right-leaning Republican Party (the old Gaullists) saw their representation nearly slashed in half. But on economic and tax policy, Macron is far less of a revolutionary.

The great supply-side experiment is over. After years of cratering revenues and hard choices about spending cuts, the Republican-controlled Legislature has pulled the plug on Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s 2012 tax program. Both the Kansas House and Senate overrode Brownback’s veto June 6 by wide majorities. Already commentators are rushing to declare all tax cuts obsolete as a result of Kansas’s experience, but that would be a gross overreaction to what actually happened.

The Congressional Budget Office released its updated analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), giving Democrats new ammunition to attack the bill and making some Republicans even more nervous about the consequences of healthcare reform in the 2018 midterm elections. But given what the CBO said about the bill, it’s clear that very little has changed since the first report in March.

For most of the year, Republicans have said that passing healthcare reform and presidential involvement in the process could make tax reform much easier. In the last two weeks, President Trump released a tax plan and the House passed a repeal-and-replace bill by a narrow margin. Unfortunately, it’s not all that clear that either of these events will actually help the GOP accomplish anything on taxes.